Creating and editing pivot table reports

Overview of pivot table reports

A pivot table report is a dynamic table that lets you interpret data in different ways without ever having to enter a formula. Pivot table reports are particularly useful when you want to narrow down a large data set or analyze relationships between data points.

In just a few clicks, you can summarize and analyze a large set of data through different categorizations and calculations. For example, from a list of students in a college class, you can get a quick understanding of the the age distribution of and number of science majors in the class.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you're building a pivot table report:

Always organize your data into columns. Column headers become the fields that you add into your pivot table report.

Google Sheets will automatically detect a range of cells for your pivot table. If you don't manually select a range of cells, Google Sheets will do it for you. You can edit this data range at any point.

Drag fields to other categories to change your data analysis quickly and easily.

You can create multiple pivot table reports from the same set of data. Simply go back to the data source and create a new pivot table report. It will create a new pivot table report on a separate sheet.

Pivot tables created in Microsoft Excel can be uploaded and converted to Google Sheets, and pivot table reports created in Google Sheets can be downloaded and converted to Microsoft Excel format. This lets you continue to analyze your data no matter what format you're working in.